JDocs.com is a very nice collection of (at the moment of writing) 132 searchable API’s. The javadocs of the most popular opensource projects have been indexed and to provide a bit of added value users can leave notes at every javadoc entry (a class, a method etc) found in the JDocs database. Very handy when you’re looking for documentation but haven’t downloaded the javadocs and added them to your favourite IDE’s javadoc viewer. A bit of a pitty nobody seems to leave notes, at least I could not find a note at all, so the community aspect of this site is a bit low. But, the search is handy and even very powerful (read their faq to find out how to query for a specific api or how to narrow a search to methods only).
Another great site is JExamples.com. This site does not provide javadocs but example code. In other words the JDocs notes can be found on this site. Simply search for a class or a method name and you get a list of example code. Works very neat and no community is needed to update the examples because JExamples uses the brilliant mechanism of code scanning: They simply scan and index the source code of several popular open source projects to fill their example database. And a very nice side effect of this is you get some insight in the quality of open source projects while doing your own stuff.
If only the two sites could merge! Won’t happen in the short-time but just play around with the two to find out how to leverage your javadoc browsing techniques.
By the way, I’ve added both sites to the ‘Links’ section of this weblog.
